Blackwell launch gets even worse as Nvidia confirms some RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 Ti GPUs are underperforming in games – here’s how to check if you’re affected

• Testing has shown that the RTX 5080 is close to the RTX 5090’s performance
• This is despite the RTX 5090 having quite a beefier spec, and laptops with this GPU being much more expensive
• There are reasons for this, though, on the performance front, seemingly wrapped up in power use and thermals

Nvidia’s RTX 5080 laptop GPU is surprisingly close to the performance of the RTX 5090 mobile, going by some recent testing of gaming laptops that use these freshly arrived graphics cards.

Although this isn’t as much of a case of glowing praise for the speed of the RTX 5080 as such – though it is very fast – rather it’s more about a relative lack of oomph that the Blackwell flagship GPU seems to be burdened with (for a reason that I’ll come back to later).